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Linux Zswap Still Aiming For Compressed Swap Caching

Phoronix: Linux Zswap Still Aiming For Compressed Swap Caching

A second version of the Zswap patch-set for the Linux kernel was published this week. The Zswap patches provide compressed swap caching support to compress pages in the process of being swapped and compresses them into a dynamically allocated RAM-backed memory pool...

TBH, I really never saw the purpose of swap-caches.
Before you start a rant, I want to clear up that, when you have enough RAM, you don't really need a Swap-Partition.
Moreover, it wears out SSD-drives which should be avoided. Considering memory has turned very cheap in the last few years, I myself really recommend you to just buy your 16Gb-sticks and are good to go without putting to much IO-load on your hard-drive.
Even when you use a distribution like Gentoo, you can easily turn the Makeopts to 8 simultaneous tasks (on i7) without reaching the memory limit (only 8 Gb Max.).

Nevertheless, compressing the swap-file is a great concept and I am looking forward to what it will bring.

If you have a completely different opinion on this topic, please let me know!

Can someone with some insight relate how Zswap differs from zRam? Sounds like the only difference is zSwap compresses memory as its being written to swap (if I understand correctly), while zRam uses a separate "compressed ram swap" before falling back to the standard swap...

Can someone with some insight relate how Zswap differs from zRam? Sounds like the only difference is zSwap compresses memory as its being written to swap (if I understand correctly), while zRam uses a separate "compressed ram swap" before falling back to the standard swap...